From TAC: do libertarians have a problem with authority? Right. I’m against tyranny but like Mark don’t like the selfish, ‘question authority, man’ left-libertarian hatred of any traditional order. I still call myself a libertarian though. Close enough.

From Rod Dreher: Notre Dame gay group? The Catholic Church has the right to govern itself (Pope Benedict can kick out liberal dissenters). This doesn’t violate homosexuals’ civil rights; if you don’t like the church, don’t go to its colleges! Like all Catholic colleges, ND is really a private school that only says it’s Catholic as long as the diocese doesn’t object. So, as part of the church’s self-government, if this is an official group against church teaching, the diocese should say ND’s no longer Catholic, unbelievable as that sounds. (As New York did to little Marist College, which that order still partly runs.) Probably the shot across the bow/kick in the pants that the old Americanist Catholics need, like when the Pope fixed the Novus Ordo in English. Also, if the group’s funded only by students, not the school, that is, not an official school group, can they have it? Still, it seems another, belated cave-in to the larger Protestant culture, shocking for a school that used to be synonymous with American Catholic identity along with the Democratic Party and unions. I’ve never been there but understood it’s so big it reflects the whole church including Pope Benedict’s renewal; there’s a Tridentine Mass, inconceivable 20 years ago. Imitating liberal Protestants, white ethnic Catholics are dying out like them; our numbers are artificially steady because of Mexican immigration. Interesting from Matt in TX: This is arguably a smaller deal than it seems. Gay student groups on college campuses are notoriously unpopular and poorly attended, with most the gay students finding better things to do with their time.

7 comments:

Re: "As New York did to little Marist College, which that order still partly runs."

IIRC Marist is 100% secular. There are Marist brothers associated with the college as students and "employees," but the Marist Order no longer runs, owns, or "calls the shots." Sad in a way that Marist College is no longer a Catholic college, although I am also glad that Marist is doing very well! Marist used to get (maybe still does?) considerable funding from IBM and other generous benefactors, and has used their funds wisely and well.

Re: "Probably the shot across the bow/kick in the pants that the old Americanist Catholics need, like when the Pope fixed the Novus Ordo in English."

I have been coming to the conclusion,lately, that perhaps Pope Leo XIII had been "right-on" vis-a-vis Americanism. I had previously considered his encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, as more reflecting Italian patrician, autocratic ideology than theology and Church polity.

I wonder if American Catholic Church exceptionalism has been influenced at least partly by America's colonial, Protestant past--the i.e., the old Puritan desire to establish a New Jerusalem, that "City on a Hill" in the New World.

You're right. I looked it up. It's understandable to think the order still has some control because it's still there.

I think all American Catholic colleges are independent of the church in order to get government funding but, as Wikipedia says, with John Paul II's Ex Corde Ecclesiæ, all colleges that said they were Catholic before 1991 are assumed to still be so unless the school says otherwise. In 2003 the college invited pro-abortion Eliot Spitzer to be the graduation speaker and afterwards told the archdiocese they're not Catholic anymore. Got to give Marist credit for being honest.

I'm no expert on the church vs. Americanism but as a libertarian I tend to think like you did about it.

You can probably blame living in a Protestant country, that country's prosperity going to people's heads and, the thing that made Leo's fear come true, the sellout at Vatican II, for AmChurch, the Americanists today. American exceptionalism? Maybe, indirectly. Again, part of Protestant influence.

I could only hope that Protestantism would be restored to American life and culture, that is, speaking of mass culture. The entertainment and news industries' elite--functionally atheist/secularist/indifferentist--have killed our national religion. In reading an obit for Neil Armstrong, the author stated that when asked if he had any religious beliefs, Armstrong stated that he was a Deist. If only Deism--"Divine Providence" rules--would be the national religion of the U.S.!!!

I believe that there are two possible religions for a nation-state: a national religion and a state religion. All nation states have something for their national religions. The U.S. has no state religion--thank God--but I wish it still had a national religion such as Judeo-Christianity, Protestantism, or Deism. I could live with any of these, but not the functional secular humanism (not very humanistic, though) we have today.

Marist is very selective. Only 30% of applicants are accepted according to the Wiki article. I couldn't get in today, but I got in in 1966, my 3rd choice. I am the son of an elementary school teacher (my father). I didn't pass the physical for NROTC (my eyes were 20/40 corr to 20/20--needed 20/20 w/o correction). My 1st two choices for college, assuming I could earn a NROTC scholarship, was Villanova and Holy Cross. In 1966, Marist's tuition was $400 per semester. I had to take out National Student Defense Loans all four years to fund my education. I paid those loans back when so many others didn't! Back then, going to college costs about what a fairly decent automobile costs. Nowadays I perceive going to college costs what a modestly sized mansion would cost! If I had to do it today--consider going to college--I would say "no thanks" and would have probably gotten myself killed in Afghanistan! And if I survived my military tour, I would likely try for a high tech, technician position somewhere within the electronics industry. :-) :-(

"I’ve never been there but understood it’s so big it reflects the whole church including Pope Benedict’s renewal; there’s a Tridentine Mass, inconceivable 20 years ago."

I went to graduate school there in the early 2000s and can confirm your impression that Notre Dame is a big tent; pretty much all of the camps in American Catholicism from trads to far-left 'Spirit of Vatican II' types, including a wide variety of lay movements (everything from Opus Dei to Catholic Worker), were represented in some way on campus. As for the trads, though, I'll note that we had a tougher time of it at Notre Dame in the wilderness years before Summorum Pontificum: the idea of a weekly TLM on campus as they have now was unthinkable, and the local indult Mass in South Bend was offered only two Sundays a month at one in the afternoon at an out-of-the-way parish. Things have improved a lot since, not just with the TLM on campus but with an every-Sunday and Solemnity TLM celebrated at a downtown South Bend parish by a FSSP priest who commutes from Fort Wayne.

One other tidbit about Notre Dame: while I was there, I had a friend who was a theology grad student who said that most of his fellow graduate students in the department supported women's ordination and implied that one almost had to espouse that position to be accepted socially within the group. I don't know what's like now, though the people who were grad students when I was there have all moved on and I've met some who have gone there since who seemed to be solidly orthodox by contrast - perhaps that's a sign of a larger generational shift among American Catholics seeking grad degrees in theology.

No, McBrien is (relatively recently) retired - Deo gratias - and the newer hires are sufficienly orthodox that the likes of First Things now tout the place as one of the very best places to study Catholic theology in North America (see here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/11/ranking-theology-programs/rr-reno).